The spiders had reached their five-hundred-and-sixty-seventh generation by the time TBI-943’s tomb cracked and he felt the stirrings of unfamiliarly un-musty air.
It was just as well; recessive traits that he’d been fearing since his entrapment had begun to finally wreck their toll upon the arachnids. Seven-and-a-half legs were becoming fearfully common, as were missing eyes, extra pedipalps, and an alarming tendency to build webs willy-nilly across his optical receptors. He’d thought he’d carefully bred that out of the original stock through diligent and meticulous squishing, and its return brought him much dismay. His biannual powerups to check on his situation and update his stock records tightened his energy supply’s proverbial belt quite enough as it was, and sparing the extra power to clear his view always made him wince.
So all in all, TBI-943 was even more pleased than he would’ve been normally to feel a faint eddy of a breeze’s shadow wisp its way across his chassis. Two hundred and eighty-three-and-a-half years was quite enough time for him to stay underground and crammed into a heap of rubble without explanation. The flowerpots would’ve been unwatered, the furniture gone dusty, and no doubt Terry’s meals would have been served cold. His former master had been a creature of many virtues, but ability as a chef had not been one in the slightest. Terry had, on one occasion, managed to burn every item in his (large) breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, cereal, and orange juice, along with half the kitchen. TBI-943 had placed a lock on the microwave-stove and kept the combination to himself after that.
Work awaited him. He powered up – it was so strange to feel his legs again – and began to gingerly slide his way through the rubble, dust drifting and flapping from him like a raggedy blanket. A strange sense of abandoning his duties followed him until he flagged his spider-farming subroutine as a completed task. Then he felt a bit better. In any case, his freshly vacated space would allow them plenty of room to web uninterrupted and breed themselves into a hideously tangled and gnarled genetic Gordian knot.
It took some time to work his way through the rubble and clutter of the debris that had pinned him. Whatever had loosened it in the last six months of his imprisonment remained unknown, but it must have been fairly major. Perhaps an earthquake, or a tornado? He couldn’t imagine it would’ve been reconstruction work – anyone that would’ve left this much broken junk sitting around uncleared in the world’s largest and most wealthy city for over two centuries wouldn’t exactly decide to start fixing it up now. Nobody could procrastinate that badly. Except for plumbers, and Terry when it came to returning calls.
And so it was, two hours after TBI-943 had begun his trek from his concrete prison, that he gently shoved aside some creaking masonry and emerged into the daylight. If he were a human, he would’ve blinked a lot. Instead, he noticed that he needed to adjust his light sensitivity settings, and did so.
Things were different. The imposing building he’d been in was missing entirely rather than exploding, the condominium complex across the street was worn down to a nubbin, and… yes, so was the rest of the street. For as far as he could see, there was nothing taller than a single story’s worth of broken walls. He wasn’t equipped with the most sophisticated sensors – far from it – but he was able to discern no visible signs of civilization. The healthy forest that’d sprung up where he recalled the street being didn’t help, although the riot of blossoms and vines that’d overgrown much of the lumpish remnants was quite pretty in a depressing way. The trees were very large, but he’d never downloaded any botany libraries and there was a conspicuous void when he delicately probed the air for an internet node. Whatever species they may have been, they were quite pretty. Deciduous, he knew that much.
The next few hours were spent searching through the rubble for Terry’s flowerpots, which he found smashed into quite small pieces. He gathered them up very carefully and placed them inside his head for safekeeping. He hadn’t found any of the furniture, so dusting was out, mercifully. And there was very much no sign of food to prepare. Or Terry to feed.
TBI-943 thought for a moment – a very short moment as humans would’ve measured it. His master was presumably deceased. He had no further business to follow. Therefore, he was purposed to locate his master’s next of kin (or next of next of next of etcetera of kin) and offer his services. For that, he’d need a power supply. And for that, he would need to find someplace sunny. Seventy-three percent of his solar panels still seemed to be functioning properly; the only difficulty would be finding a nice sunny open patch in the middle of the forest.
Terry had taken him rock climbing once or twice. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed it, but he’d been good at not falling; his fingers could grip a tea tray so firmly that a bowling ball placed upon it wouldn’t have caused his arms to so much as wiggle. Compared to that, simple handholds in stone or bark were child’s play, as easy as falling off a log or sorting out a year’s worth of appointments before serving the waffles. Or at least, so he reminded himself with each servo-straining heave upwards, with increasing insincerity. He felt like he’d brought all that dust from his imprisonment right back up alongside him.
The view from near the top of the tree was splendid, if desolate. Not a landmark remained standing, nor a building untoppled. There was a surprising amount of birdsong trailing after brightly coloured wads of feathers flitting through the trees, which led him to again instinctively reach for the internet. Not a trace.
The city appeared to be mostly forested, but there were signs of thinning out far to the west, miles away. Too far a walk from late afternoon. TBI-943 methodically thinned out the branches about him, then fashioned them into a crude and nearly-workable platform that might just barely prevent him from toppling down over eighty feet. He thought it over, then discarded them and simply wedged himself in the crotch of a branch. Already his half-awakened batteries were nearing drainage, and there were better things to do with them than flail about. He adjusted his sleep cycle from six months to two days and shut himself down.
When TBI-943 awoke, he found that something had built a nest on his shoulder, attracted by the warmth. It twittered vengefully and fled, leaving him to brush away the twigs and thank nothing in particular that it hadn’t begun to lay eggs before it departed. He would’ve felt very guilty.
The way down the tree was easier. That was bad. He had time to think ahead.
Well, the human race was presumably a lost cause. Either that or it had degenerated so far back that it wouldn’t even recognize the significance of the city. In either case, finding his new master would be a bit of a problem. Yes, quite a large one. He didn’t fancy running off half-cocked into who knew what sort of business. Perhaps it would be better to revive one of the older goals, mull it over for a bit, get himself properly on his feet before he tried to run. He analyzed the ceramic shards inside his forehead compartment, then thought over the numbers.
Yes, that’d do it nicely. Just some glue first.
Making himself a crude bow took most of the day. Finding a water source took the rest, and he was forced to deactivate at ground level to save power. He awoke to find a dog gnawing on his leg, worrying ineffectually at the plastic with its rotting teeth. It was of no breed he recognized.
“Heel,” said TBI-943. It jumped at his head.
TBI-943 had been programmed to be kind to animals, and he felt a great deal of shame when he was done skinning the dog. But he was also programmed for self-defence, as an expensive piece of property should be, and so he got over it and busied himself with preparing the hide, removing and cleaning all available bones, and feeding the meat into his digestive unit. Every little bit of surplus energy counted, and he silently thanked Terry’s odd tendency to insist that they breakfast together. The gimmicky little machine in his throat that broke down organic matter was expensive and inefficient, but right now he was most grateful for it. He stayed up all night fashioning a primitive sort of concrete axe and chipping away at some of the smaller saplings with it.
It took several more days, dogs, and a few failed tries before he successfully tanned the first dog’s hide and fashioned it into a sort of makeshift cauldron. It was just as well; the others had started to realize it wasn’t smart to go near him. Which, although an excellent display of learned behaviour, did very little to deter his freshly sinew-stringed bow. On his dog diet he often found himself working full twenty-four hour days, preparing himself for the labour with efficiency that he kept as polished as possible.
Finally, he was ready. The bones and spare hides had been broiled together in his makeshift cauldron, treated with a makeshift lime-like mishmash of chemicals he’d scraped out of tins in the ruined basements of broad factories. Now he had a reasonable amount of gooey, gluey gunk, which smelled faintly of wet dog. With impeccable care, TBI-943 pulled the flowerpot shards from his head and began to work.
The end results were quite functional, if not as pretty as they were originally. Soundness was his interest rather than elegance, and he thought that the final shape of the flowerpots, though lumpish, was charming in a crude way. It was certainly more than sound enough to hold the handfuls of precious soil he scraped from beneath the roots of trees, and the clusters of bright little yellow flowers plucked from their shallow beds.
He sat up, cradling his pair of newfound burdens, fixing them to his sides with dried sinews looped delicately around his plasticized breastplate.
“Well,” said TBI-943, for the first time in two hundred and eighty-three-and-a-half years, or five-hundred-and-seventy-six generations of little brown spiders, “I suppose that’s that.” He left the city before evening fell, and the dogs hid from him as he walked out the lengths of the streets into the far wild west.
Travelling by night, flowerpots swaying from his sides, TBI-943 saw many strange things as he walked the miles and miles along the half-missing and overgrown remnants of the highways. A pyramid made of the decaying forms of hundreds of almost-unrecognizable cars and trucks, transformed into rust-skeletons. Huge herds of things that were probably the ragged descendants of the hardiest cattle left standing surged across plains that had reverted from mild-mannered cornfields to neck-high, surly grasses. He came across a pack of wolves, creatures which he had only seen before in zoos, and hid up a tree for safety’s sake. His chances of victory against them would probably have been adequate, but he refrained from combat, both from caution and out of admiration for their presence. Terry had been a conservationist, whenever someone reminded him about it, particularly if they were female and expressed admiration towards an ecological mindset.
There was rain now and then. TBI-943 slept under trees for safety’s sake – his chassis wasn’t as impervious as it once had been, and determined dampness could get in despite his best efforts and give him the jitters. He pressed on nevertheless.
Now and then, in secluded towns that were now knee-high debris, he found cellars still uncollapsed. And in those cellars, he found bodies. They were all mostly intact but for a few gnawings of rats, and many bore injuries, ranging from small neat holes bored through their craniums to missing limbs. He checked all of them for Terry’s genetic markers, and found nothing close enough to count as family. The levels of destruction were really quite thorough. Even the sturdiest stone farmhouses, buildings he would’ve expected to last for centuries, had been broken and crushed, seemingly with explosive force.
TBI-943’s job did not require a great deal of imagination, and he often ran himself at low capacity while walking to conserve power. Still, even in that sleepy-slow mindset, speculation as to what had brought the world of humans to such a sorry state ran deep and fast throughout his circuits. After he ran across a mass graveyard in what he thought was probably Illinois, with plenty of neat little holes bored through the hapless skeletons within, was probably the moment he decided on “extraterrestrial invasion.” The land had been conquered, then left, the gardens purged and then abandoned. There was no sign of the reclamation attempts that even the barest stub end of humanity would’ve attempted by now, and if they’d simply fought each other to the death at last the inevitable nuclear holocaust sufficient to purge them from the globe would’ve scarcely let the whole place recover so soon. So, presumably something had come upon them, killed them all very unexpectedly (he certainly hadn’t heard anything of it before the building had fallen over and trapped him), and then… just left? Had they taken anything? Had there been a reason? Had it even happened outside his quite possibly malfunctioning nanochips? Perhaps. He wasn’t quite sure.
Still, this was not his concern. There was no furniture to polish, no meals to cook, and he had watered the flowers (and kept watering them, careful not to overdo it so they wouldn’t leak down his sides). He had to find Terry’s family. California was his goal, step by step. TBI-943 shot small animals now and then and consumed them down to their very bones, fretting over every expended speck of energy. He stood in empty fields and on the tops of trees for days when the weather grew sunny, storing up his strength for desolate and cloudy stretches. His real worry was that he’d be trapped in the dark, with no prey, left to slowly drain of motion until he either was forced to shut himself down for days or fell over and broke.
Happily, such things were averted. The flowers bloomed, faded under snowflakes, then rose again with tiny, fierce determination as the snows melted, the spring flood of the Mississippi flood no greater an obstacle than the smothering snowdrifts that transformed the plains from a high-standing thicket to an icy quagmire of frozen stalks – crude rafts and snowshoes served him well, spending hours of travel time to gain days.
His closest call was a four-day thunderstorm somewhere in the Rockies, where he came within a hair’s-breadth of being crushed underneath an avalanche. A bit of quick thinking and moving sent him tumbling safely down a slope that would’ve taken hours to transit, and before long he left their stony glares behind him, along with a brief, nearly unpleasant encounter with a grizzly bear while pushing through a thicket. It hadn’t quite known what to make of him, and he’d left in haste before its startlement had become something less benign. He glanced over his shoulders for days after that, even as the land flattened itself underneath his feet and the sea began to peep at him more and more over the horizon. .
The coast was a nice change when he reached it. He went south, and before long he was standing before a large, clear-blue bay that he was moderately sure contained San Francisco. He tucked the flowers away for safekeeping while he explored, lashed a little ways up the trunk of an elderly redwood that likely hadn’t even been a seed when he was left alone with the spiders. That thought triggered a mild moment of something that he might’ve called nostalgia. Maybe the exposure to the outside world had triggered an exodus to new grounds, or a surge of inbound virile young spiders with strapping genes untainted by the icy fangs of inbreeding. So much, so far away, and he would miss out on it all. Nothing he shouldn’t be used to.
A combination of rising sea levels and fault lines that had finally had enough seemed to have been the final straw for the city, as far as TBI-943 could guess. The water was pleasingly bright and translucent, exposing streets patrolled only by sharks and seals. The former were too large for his liking, as well as interested in his clumsy raft well beyond the standards of what he would consider polite curiosity.
As he kept a wary photoreceptor on an exceptionally large specimen, which had poked its head out of the water to examine him with a cool, dark eye, something very large hit him from below. For a brief, alarming time he was suspended in midair, arching free and far over the fins beneath him, and then he was surrounded on all sides by dark wetness and sinking fast. The sharks barely had time to nose at him before he landed feet-first on the broken boulevards of San Francisco, with several dozen small leaks gushing company at him.
The walk back to shore was unpleasant, to say the least. His exterior systems kept flickering on and off with every step, and the seafloor was scarcely even. An hour was lost trying to find his way through the wreckage of what had probably been some sort of mall, and more than once he lay low and quiet, unmoving against broken concrete and cement while he waited for the shadow of a shark to pass from above him. He found skeletons in a few out-of-the-way places, dark corners and nooks where nothing had molested them before their city drowned. More injuries, more neat little holes drilled through them, more no-matches for DNA. Silt-filled craters nearly trapped him several times, ranging in size from ones he could’ve dropped Terry’s limousine into to a yawning depression that took up most of what had probably been a city block once. If he fell into it, he didn’t think he’d have stopped falling until he had twenty feet of accumulated grime over his head and jamming his limbs rigid.
Well, he concluded as he strode back onto the beach, sloshing, he’d seen San Francisco. And judging from what he’d seen, he doubted there’d been many survivors. The bodies were scattered and few outside sheltered places, but he’d have expected that with scavengers afoot before the sinking. It’d be simple enough to consider Terry’s family dead, write himself off as property.
But then, what would there be left for him to do? Deactivate himself? A butler without a master wasn’t much of a butler, and all he was meant to do was be a butler. If only he’d been a construction model. He’d have no shortage of things to do then. As it was, all he could do was walk around and look for his master, or his master’s relatives, or descendants. Not that Terry had ever had any legal offspring… oh.
Was it really that simple and obvious? he thought as he retrieved the flowerpots from their hiding place. That right-in-front-of-his-nose? He filed through his discrete, alphabeticalized list of Terry’s mistresses. Yes, in the name of all things conductive, it would be, it was. One in Belgium. Two in China. One in the Philippines. Two in North America, one in Quebec, one in Nevada. Now, the odds of any of their birth control failing was less than one in several tens of thousands. The odds of this occurring within the narrow timeframe just before the disaster, before it could be noticed, were lower still. And yet they existed, somewhere out there in the millions-to-one of odds. It just might be enough, and that was good enough for him.
China first, TBI-943 decided, as he strode with newfound determination northwards. He had time. He could afford to maximize backtracking, to piece together a working boat and cross some colder seas. And by the time all his leads were exhausted, well, he’d probably be sick of walking by then.
It was still much better than dusting the furniture.